The Times of India thankfully thinks just the opposite of Singh “insofaras The Hindu is concerned” in this new TV commercial for ToI‘s three-year-old Madras edition.

With the punchline “Stuck with news that puts you to sleep?”, the TVC makes no effort to hide who, it thinks, is turning Madrasans into Kumbhakarans when the City’s landscape is changing, young achievers are setting new benchmarks, politicians are lavishly dispensing patronage, etc.

The idea, clearly, is to drive home the width and depth of ToI‘s local coverage as opposed to The Hindu‘s much-vaunted international outlook. For, in the 54th second, a close-up shot shows a sleeping giant in the arms of a policeman at a drill session holding the op-ed page of the “Mount Road Mahavishnu”.

Will conveying the opposition as sleep-inducing in “conservative” Madras work? And is getting the nerves jangling with “tactile” news the primary function of a newspaper?

“The objective is clearly to create dissonance among the readers of The Hindu by portraying their brand choice as boring. I feel it may make for interesting advertising but will fail to deliver the objective of getting the readers of The Hindu to switch.

“The character of Chennai has changed over the years with the growing IT/Services and automobile industry. For ‘new entrants’ to Chennai, ToI was an alternative to The Hindu. But for die-hard Chennai dwellers, ToI is still an outsider. Questioning their intelligence may end up being counter productive.”

Television ratings are like the Bhagavad Gita for TV companies. They can read into it what they want to read out of it. Which is why each TV station claims to be No. 1 and still somehow turns out to be right in its own way.

Ditto, newspaper readership figures.

Round one of the Indian Readership Survey (IRS) is out, and to the surprise of nobody, India’s two biggest Hindi dailies—Dainik Jagran and Dainik Bhaskar—are both claiming no.1 status.

“IRS officially states that the redership of a single publication Dainik Jagran is higher than the readership of other publication groups,” screams the Jagran ad (below), which publishes 36 editions from 11 states and has claims “5.5 crore readers”.

In response, Dainik Bhaskar, which too publishes from 11 States but has 48 editions in three languages and claims “1.74 crore readers”: “That’s what makes us the largest read newspaper group.”